2010. What a year.
Throughout we were busy planning to get the Vivid Wines Winery ready for the harvest and to our own surprise it all went quite smooth. Too smooth? We do not think so. Our experience helped us to ensure that everything went to plan.
At Vivid Wines we aim to source the best possible grapes for the production of our English ultra premium sparkling and still wines, to enable our customers to enjoy exceptional quality year after year.
Flashback 2010
The 2010 vintage has shown us once again that we are right in perusing to source our grapes from the main English grape growing vineyards and not concentrating on one vineyard alone. The vintages in the UK are just too inconsistent, not necessarily in quality but also in quantity due to the diverse localised microclimate, something you can find in the UK, especially in the South.
2010 started of with exceptional cold temperatures and heavy snowfall. The cold stayed with us until March. Which resulted in late frosts. Not so much a problem for the Bud- Burst, but a delay in the initial growth for nearly four weeks for all kind of plants and crops.
The pessimistic vineyard owners gave up, the optimistic ones hoped for a very sunny summer for the vines to catch up.
And boy, make sure you can cope with what you wish for. The late spring and early summer got sunny down here in the south- east and west. To hot? Not really, but very warm with a lack of rain, resulting in the vines to experience a serious thirst. leafs on the vines and the ones who actually caught up growth stopped growing to protect themselves.
I was neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but in a year like this, I was eagerly looking forward to an interesting and challenging harvest. Everything was possible. The weather kept on playing with us giving us little rain, not many sun hours and it was simply dry and cloudy. And then, who would have thought. What followed was rain, and lots of it, until September. The vineyards we source our grapes from always take great care of their grapes and were fine but a lot of others experienced big problems with mildew and other disease.
Late September finally we had a sunny period that was specially good for the later ripening varieties and so our strategy was to keep the grapes like CH, PN, PM on the vines to give them that extra edge. Some vineyard were hit by an overnight -8°C frost and for them the gamble did not pay off. But most growers were fine and so the harvest started.
In a good year every one makes a good wine, in a challenging year you can separate the sheep’s from the goats.
The grapes were picked at the height of harvest and their maturity is being determined by several factors like pH-levels, acidity, Oechsle, skin texture and taste. The physiological ripeness is what counts most for us.
The grapes were picked into 15 kg crates and immediately delivered to the Vivid Wines Winery to not disturb their integrity. The Pinot Noir and Chardonnay lots were sorted and went as whole bunch into the press to gently separate the juice from the skins.
The Pinot Noir grapes chosen for the red wine were de-stemmed and the berries sorted to be transferred by minimum amount of mechanical influence into the red fermenter tanks.
Now, after the malolactic fermentation is done on all our wines, which will give them some smooth and silky characteristics, we have started the blending trials. The pinot noir red wine is transfered into 225 litres barriques to mature and enhance the essential complexities with the help of oak and oxygen.
To give you a little sneak a peek, Vivid Wines will deliver a barrique fermented Chardonnay and lovely salmon coloured rosé wine for the 2011 summer season and a barrique matured Pinot Noir for the Christmas holidays.
Our finest range of hand crafted English Sparkling Wines will be carefully matured and ready to be served from spring 2012. Ready for your own Olympic celebrations.
A happy and prosperous new year
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2010, 2011, 2012, artisan, barrique, chardonnay, crafted, english, hand, harvest, olympics, pinot meunier, pinot noir, red, rose, sparkling, vintage, vivid, white, wine, wines
